The Inheritance of Loss (15 page)

Emergency! Saaeed S-aa-eed?
"

He put it down and unplugged it.

Saeed: "Those boys, let them in, they will
never
leave. They are desperate.

Desperate.
Once you let them in, once you hear their story, you can’t say no, you know their aunty, you know their cousin, you have to help the
whole
family, and once they begin, they will take
everything.
You can’t say this is my food, like Americans, and only I will eat it. Ask Thea"—she was the latest pooky pooky interest in the bakery—"where she live with three
friends,
everyone go shopping
separately, separately
they cook their dinner,
together
they eat their
separate
food. The fridge they divide up, and into their own place—
their own place!
—

they put what is left in a
separate box.
One of the roommates, she put her
name
on the box so it say who it belong to!
"
His finger went up in uncharacteristic sternness. "In Zanzibar what one person have
he have to share with everyone,
that is
good,
that is the
right way
—

"
But then everyone have nothing, man! That is why I leave Zanzibar.
"

Silence.

Biju’s sympathy for Saeed leaked into sympathy for himself, then Saeed’s shame into his own shame that he would never help all those people praying for his help, waiting daily,
hourly,
for his response. He, too, had arrived at the airport with a few dollar bills bought on the Kath-mandu black market in his pocket and an address for his father’s friend, Nandu, who lived with twenty-two taxi drivers in Queens. Nandu had also not answered the phone and had tried to hide when Biju arrived on his doorstep, and then when he thought Biju had left, had opened the door and to his distress found Biju still standing there two hours later.

"No jobs here anymore," he said. "If I were a young man I would go back to India, more opportunities there now, too late for me to make a change, but you should listen to what I’m saying. Everyone says you
have
to stay, this is where you’ll make a good life, but much better for you to
go back.
"

Nandu met someone at his work who told him of the basement in Harlem and ever since he had deposited Biju there, Biju had never seen him again.

He had been abandoned among foreigners: Jacinto the superintendent, the homeless man, a stiff bow-legged coke runner, who walked as if his balls were too big for normal walking, with his stiff yellow bow-legged dog, who also walked as if his balls were too big for normal walking. In the summer, families moved out of cramped quarters and sat on the sidewalk with boom boxes; women of great weight and heft appeared in shorts with shaven legs, stippled with tiny black dots, and groups of deflated men sat at cards on boards balanced atop garbage cans, swigged their beer from bottles held in brown paper bags. They nodded kindly at him, sometimes they even offered him a beer, but Biju did not know what to say to them, even his tiny brief "Hello" came out wrong: too softly, so they did not hear, or just as they had turned away.

________

The green card the green card. The. . . .

Without it he couldn’t leave. To leave he wanted a green card. This was the absurdity. How he desired the triumphant After The Green Card Return Home, thirsted for it—to be able to buy a ticket with the air of someone who could return if he wished, or not, if he didn’t wish. . . . He watched the legalized foreigners with envy as they shopped at discount baggage stores for the miraculous, expandable third-world suitcase, accordion-pleated, filled with pockets and zippers to unhook further crannies, the whole structure unfolding into a giant space that could fit in enough to set up an entire life in another country.

Then, of course, there were those who lived and died illegal in America and never saw their families, not for ten years, twenty, thirty, never again.

How did one do it? At the Queen of Tarts, they watched the TV shows on Sunday mornings on the Indian channel that showcased an immigration lawyer fielding questions.

A taxi driver appeared on the screen: watching bootleg copies of American movies he had been inspired to come to America, but how to move into the mainstream? He was illegal, his taxi was illegal, the yellow paint was illegal, his whole family was here, and all the men in his village were here, perfectly infiltrated and working within the cab system of the city. But how to get their papers? Would any viewer out there wish to

marry him? Even a disabled or mentally retarded green card holder would be fine—

________

It was, of course, Saeed Saeed who found out about the van and took Omar, Kavafya, and Biju to Washington Heights, and there they waited on a street corner. All the shops had grills, even the little chewing gum and cigarette places.

The pharmacies and liquor stores had buzzers; he saw people ringing, gaining admittance into a cage set into the shop from where you could survey the shelves and point to what you wanted, and after money had been placed in the revolving tray set into a little hole carved out of the grill and the bullet proof glass, purchased objects would be sent grudgingly around. Even in the Jamaican patty place, the lady, the patties, the callaloo and rotis, the Drinks Nice Every Time—

sat behind a high-security barricade.

Still, it was jolly. Many people thronged by. Outside the Church of Zion, a preacher baptized a whole line of people in the spray of a fire hydrant. A man emerged in a Florida hibiscus shorts-and-shirt combo, thin knobby knees, crinkly pomaded hair, little square Charlie Chaplin—Hitler mustache, carrying a tape player, "
Guantanamera . . . guajira Guantanamera.
. . ." A pair of saucy women hailed him from the windows: "Oooo BABY! Look at them l e g s!
Ooooooooo
weeee!
You free tonight?"

Another lady was giving advice to a younger woman who accompanied her:

"Life is short, sweetheart—Put him out with the garbage! You are young, you should be happy! Poot! heem! out! weeth! de! gar-baje!"

________

Saeed was at home here. He lived two streets up and many people hailed him on the street.

"Saeed!"

A boy with a gold chain as fat as a bathtub attachment, his prosperity flashing out, slapped Saeed on the back. . . .

"What does he do?" Biju asked about the boy.

Saeed laughed. "Hustling."

To further chili-pepper the occasion, Saeed regaled them with a story of how he had been helping one of the tribes move; and a car stopped while they were struggling with boxes of patched clothes, an alarm clock, shoes, a blackened pot all the way from Zanzibar thrown into the suitcase by a tearful mother—and a gun came out of the car window and a voice said:

"Put it in the back, boys." The trunk opened, and "That’s all?" the voice behind the gun said in disgust. Then the car had driven off.

________

They waited at the corner, sweating away, my God, my God. . . . Finally a battered van came by and they paid into the cracked open door, handed over their photographs taken according to INS requirements showing a single bared ear and a three-quarter profile, and were thumbprinted through the crack. Two weeks later, they waited once more—

they waited—

and waited—

and. . . . The van did not come back. The cost of this endeavor once again emptied Biju’s savings envelope.

Omar suggested they console themselves since they were in the neighborhood.

Kavafya said he would join him.

Only thirty-five dollars.

Prices not raised.

Biju blushed to remember what he had said in his hot dog days. "Smell awful. . . black women. . . .
Hubshi hubshi.
"

"It’s too hot," he said, "for me to go."

They laughed.

"Saeed?"

But Saeed didn’t have to go to whores.

He was meeting a new pooky pooky.

"What happened to Thea?" asked Biju.

"She has gone for hiking outside the city. I told her, ‘AFRICAN MEN don’t look at leaves!!’ Anyway, man, I still have one or two pooky pookies that Thea don’t know about."

"You better watch out," said Omar. "White women, they look good when they’re young, but wait, they fall apart fast, by forty they look so ugly, hair falling out, lines everywhere, and those spots and those veins, you know what I’m talking about. . . ."

Saeed said, "Ah ah ah ha ha, I know, I know." He understood their jealousy.

________

At the bakery a customer found an entire mouse baked inside a sunflower loaf. It must have gone after the seeds. . . .

A team of health inspectors arrived. They entered in the style of U.S.

Marines, the FBI, the CIA, the NYPD; burst in: HANDS UP!

They found a burst sewage pipe, a hiccuping black drain, knives stored behind the toilet, rat droppings in the flour, and in a forgotten basin of eggs, single-celled organisms so comfortable they were reproducing on their own without inspiration from another.

The boss, Mr. Bocher, was called.

"The friggin’ electricity blew," said Mr. Bocher, "it’s hot outside, what the fuck are we supposed to do? "

But the same episode had occurred twice, in the days before Biju, Saeed, Omar, and Kavafya when there had been Karim, Nedim, and Jesus. The Queen of Tarts would be closed in favor of a Russian establishment.

"Fucking Russians! Crazy borscht and shit!" shouted Mr. Bocher in anger, but to no avail, and abruptly, it was all over again. "Fuck you, you fuckers," he yelled at the men who had worked for him.

________

"Come and visit uptown sometime, Biju man." Saeed quickly found employment at a Banana Republic, where he would sell to urban sophisticates the black turtleneck of the season, in a shop whose name was synonymous with colonial exploitation and the rapacious ruin of the third world.

Biju knew he probably wouldn’t see him again. This was what happened, he had learned by now. You lived intensely with others, only to have them disappear overnight, since the shadow class was condemned to movement. The men left for other jobs, towns, got deported, returned home, changed names. Sometimes someone came popping around a corner again, or on the subway, then they vanished again. Adresses, phone numbers did not hold. The emptiness Biju felt returned to him over and over, until eventually he made sure not to let friendships sink deep anymore.

________

Lying on his basement shelf that night, he thought of his village where he had lived with his grandmother on the money his father sent each month. The village was buried in silver grasses that were taller than a man and made a sound,
shuu
shuuuu, shu shuuu,
as the wind turned them this way and that. Down a dry gully through the grasses, you reached a tributary

of the Jamuna where you could watch men traveling downstream on inflated buffalo skins, the creatures’ very dead legs, all four, sticking straight up as they sailed along, and where the river scalloped shallow over the stones, they got out and dragged their buffalo skin boats over. Here, at this shallow place, Biju and his grandmother would cross on market trips into town and back, his grandmother with her sari tucked up, sometimes a sack of rice on her head.

Fishing eagles hovered above the water, changed their horizontal glide within a single moment, plunged, rose sometimes with a thrashing muscle of silver. A hermit also lived on this bank, positioned like a stork, waiting, oh waiting, for the glint of another, an elusive mystical fish; when it surfaced he must pounce lest it be lost again and never return. . . . On Diwali the holy man lit lamps and put them in the branches of the
peepul
tree and sent them down the river on rafts with marigolds—how beautiful the sight of those lights bobbing in that young dark.

When he had visited his father in Kalimpong, they had sat outside in the evenings and his father had reminisced: "How peaceful our village is. How good the roti tastes there! It is because the
atta
is ground by hand, not by machine . . . and because it is made on a
choolah,
better than anything cooked on a gas or a kerosene stove. . . . Fresh roti, fresh butter, fresh milk still warm from the buffalo.

. . ." They had stayed up late. They hadn’t noticed Sai, then aged thirteen, staring from her bedroom window, jealous of the cook’s love for his son. Small red-mouthed bats drinking from the
jhora
had swept over again and again in a witch flap of black wings.

Eighteen

"
Oh, bat, bat,
"
said Lola, panicking, as one swooped by her ear with its high-pitched
choo choo.

"What does it matter, just a bit of shoe leather flying about," said Noni, looking, in her pale summer sari, as if she were a blob of melting vanilla ice cream. . . .

"Oh shut up," said Lola.

"It’s too hot and stuffy," Lola said then, by way of apology to her sister. The monsoon must be on its way.

It was just two months after Gyan had arrived to teach Sai, and Sai had at first confused the tension in the air with his presence.

But now everyone was complaining. Uncle Potty sat limply. "It’s building.

Early this year. Better get me rum in, dolly, before the old boy is maroooooned."

Lola sipped a Disprin that fizzed and hopped in the water.